The Garments of Caean

‘Quite right, it is an aberration,’ Weld agreed. ‘Yet it is an interesting diversion. It would have displeased me not to see this possibility explored.’ He waved the member away, then picked up an object lying on a nearby table. ‘You’re from the Verrage sector, aren’t you? Have you ever seen anything like this before?’

He handed Peder a circular mirror, which at first appeared perfectly ordinary except perhaps that its surface seemed to shimmer rather oddly, which could have been a trick of the light.

But as Peder looked into it, it seemed to flame with a pale effulgence. He gazed entranced at his face in the glass. His features were undergoing a subtle transformation. They were still his own, but evincing some indefinable alien cast.

And while he remained staring wide-eyed, the eyes of his reflection closed. The face settled into a sleeping repose.

He was inexplicably alarmed. ‘How is this done?’ he exclaimed.

Weld showed a rare hint of amusement. ‘Although it looks like an ordinary mirror it is not, quite, a mirror. The image is formed not by reflected light but is a reconstituted image produced by a micro-computer backing. The device is fully perceptive.’

Peder turned the mirror over. Beyond a few barely visible etched lines there was nothing to see, and it had only the thickness of a normal looking-glass. That meant little, of course. Micro-electronics could put the contents of an entire brain into an even smaller space.

‘A sentient mirror,’ he murmured.

‘Yes. Computer sentience, of course. Not quite as real as the human variety. But even so, perhaps it has a quality we lack. It is able to experience, nothing more. It doesn’t have to perform actions, as we do.’

‘It’s purely passive. A passive sentience. A strange thought.’

‘Yes. Yet sometimes the face that looks back as one gazes into it is not quite the face that an ordinary mirror would show. It’s really quite percipient.’

Peder laid down the mirror. Similar devices were becoming common in this part of space: electronic machines which did nothing but soak up influences from their surroundings devoid of any power of action. The phenomenon was symptomatic. The colonization of the latter half of Caean had apparently produced a sort of photographic negative to the earlier culture, the ebullience of Verrage and similar places being replaced by passive receptivity, as though – to continue the analogy – the human mind had decided to turn itself into a universal camera plate.

His gaze fell on Weld’s jacket. Although Prossim was of vegetable origin, the fibres were much too minute to be visible to the naked eye – yet suddenly, in his imagination, he seemed to be seeing them, and he entered into a green, microscopic forest of living fronds, fibrillous networks and clumps of tiny bracken-like folioles, a forest which spread and rustled all around him, filling his horizon. As if from a great distance, he heard Weld speaking.

‘Ah, here comes Famaxer now.’

In answer to Weld’s summons the third Frachonard suit to be seen by Peder entered the cutaneous sodality. Peder moved forward. He seemed to walk though the matted forest, brushing aside the fern fronds. Or was the forest instead moving through him, reaching with its fibrils into his nervous system, replacing his thoughts and perceptions?

The vertiginous hallucination vanished. ‘Good day, brother,’ Famaxer greeted in a dry, cynical voice. ‘I hope Otis has not been mistreating you.’

‘No, he has been most hospitable,’ Peder answered.

Famaxer’s suit had the apparent texture of forrel, a vellum-like parchment at one time used for covering books. It imparted to Famaxer a quality of dryness, of a dusty, wind-blown environment, of a man much weathered by sun and air. His stance signified leathery cynicism, sprightly confidence – and other qualities Peder could not readily define.

It gave Peder no cause for wonderment that the Frachonard Prossim suits could guide their wearers across hundreds of light years. Apart from a flickering curiosity as to what might be Frachonard’s master plan, he never asked himself why he did what he did, any more than a man waking in the morning asks why he wakes.

As if saluting the sun, his mind was filled with the glory of Frachonard’s genius.

The three came close together. Peder was dimly aware that subtle radiations were passing between the three suits, too rarefied to be detectable on any scientific apparatus, perhaps, but nonetheless real.

‘We must call together the others, and travel,’ Famaxer said.

‘Yes, we must travel,’ Peder agreed. ‘The time has come.’

‘Something is wrong,’ Amara announced. ‘This just doesn’t make sense.’

‘It has to make some kind of sense,’ Estru argued. ‘We just haven’t found out what it is yet.’

‘This type of calculation can’t be simply set aside, not if we are to be in any way scientific,’ she insisted. ‘Sociological decay-time is a fact, not a theory.’